When comparing Marko vs Sencha Ext JS, the Slant community recommends Sencha Ext JS for most people. In the question“What are the best client-side JavaScript MV* frameworks?”Sencha Ext JS is ranked 10th while Marko is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Sencha Ext JS is:

The Sencha documentation is comprehensive, with detailed documentation and a number of examples displaying the various widgets, tools and themes.

Compiled templates are readable CommonJS modules

Pro

Small compiled templates

Marko's compiled templates are usually very small, as proven by benchmarks.

Pro

Short learning curve

It is easy to get up to speed and understand what is going on in a very short period of time.

Pro

Allows JavaScript expressions

JavaScript expressions can be executed inside the templates.

Pro

Friendly compile-time error messages

Error messages come in an easy to read and friendly format, with valid stack traces and file formats of the file(s) which brought the error(s).

Pro

Lots of tests

To prevent regressions, Marko includes a full suite of tests. The testing harness renders a collection of templates and does an exact string comparison to make sure that the tests rendered exactly as expected. There are also API tests, and negative tests to make sure that errors are reported in a friendly way.

Pro

Concise and Mixed syntax

The Concise syntax type lets you write Marko with a Jade-like indentation based syntax, and the Mixed mode lets you combine in regular HTML-style syntax.

Pro

Easy to integrate with express.js

Easy Integration with Express and Node

Pro

Server and client logic can easily be expressed within the same template

Pro

Comprehensive documentation

The Sencha documentation is comprehensive, with detailed documentation and a number of examples displaying the various widgets, tools and themes.

Pro

Supports MVC and MVVM development

Pro

Supports Web and Mobile deployment out of the one framework or codebase

Pro

Support for easy theming of applications

Pro

Visual Design tool available

The Sencha Architect product allows you to visually build your application, or rapidly prototype a system.

Pro

IDE Plugins available

A number of plugins are available for some of the commonly used IDEs (eg: JetBrains, Eclipse, Visual Studio), providing templates, refactoring support, hinting and code completion/generation, as well as management of includes and other time-saving features.

Pro

Charting package included

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Cons

Con

Very opinionated and not customizable enough

Some custom use cases are not possible. For example, trying to build an AMP page using Marko can be very challenging (special style tag requirements are hard to work with, also, Marko by default inserts a script tag into the rendered output html which is invalid in AMP and needs to be manually removed, etc..)

Con

Sencha CMD is bloated and frustrating to work with

To do any meaningful development, you are stuck with CMD. There is a gulp task that will handle the JS concatenation, but there is nothing outside of CMD that can handle theming in their ecosystem.

In addition, CMD is based on Java, and is very heavy to run (600MB+ on Windows 10 to watch for changes in the application and recompile).

Con

Sencha CMD (their CLI) is under documented, and out of date

Their latest release of CMD changed some configuration locations, but the documentation was not updated to reflect this. There is no reference guide on the json configuration files, other than the (unfortunate use of) comments in the generated json files.

Con

They use proprietary extensions to SASS, making it incompatible with anything but their Fashion processor

On the plus side, you do not have to install ruby alongside CMD for more recent versions of ExtJS. However, their Fashion processor seems to only be available through CMD.

Con

Too often breaking changes between versions. They have little concept of backwards compatibility

Compounded by the fact that there are now two "toolkits" in the same "version" of ExtJS, with certain components not existing in one vs the other.

Con

The IDE tools are not sold separately - you must purchase the appropriate license pack

You get all the IDE plugins, even if you only need one. They should offer sell them individually, or continue to bundle them with a dev license pack.

Con

Difficult to integrate with 3rd party software

Any third party library you wish to include has to be wrapped in some sort of component adapter. You have to do a lot of tweaking to get the build process right if you want the 3rd party lib to be bundled into your application in the right order.

Con

Can be expensive

The framework is a commercial package, and the recent decision to start with a minimum of 5 users may rule out smaller developer teams or startups. Recently, they have started a program that allow essentially what are contractors to purchase single licenses, but not individual, independent developers.

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